The Prague Orgy

• Ten thousand dollars? I could use ten thousand dollars. But there’s no amount of money you could give me. Nothing would be worth it.

• And you don’t care about literature.

• I care about literature. I love literature. But not as much as I love to keep these things from him. And from her. You really think I am going to give you these stories so he can keep her in jewels? You really think that in New York he’s going to publish these stories under his father’s name?

• Why shouldn’t he?

• Why should he — what’s in it for html. He’ll publish them under his own name. His beloved father is dead now ten times over. He’ll publish the stories under his own name and become famous in America like all you Jews.

• I didn’t know you were an anti-Semite.

• Only because of Sisovsky. If you would marry me, I would change. Am I so unattractive to you that you don’t want to marry me? Is his aging ingenue more attractive to you than I am?

• I can’t really believe you mean all this. You’re an impressive character. Olga. In your own way you’re fighting to live.

• Then marry me. if I am so impressive from fighting to live. You’re not married to anyone else. What are you afraid of — that I’ll take your millions?

• Look, you want a ticket out of Czechoslovakia?

• Maybe I want you.

• What if I get someone to marry you. He’ll come here, get you to America, and when you divorce him I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.

• Am I so revolting that I can only marry one of your queer friends?

• Olga, how do I wrest these stories from you? Just tell me.

• Zuckerman. if you were such an idealist about literature as you want me to be. if you would make great sacrifices for literature as you expect me to make, we would have been married twenty minutes already.

• Is whatever Sisovsky did so awful that his dead father must suffer too?

• When the stories are published in New York without the father’s name, the father will suffer more, believe me.

• Suppose that doesn’t happen. Suppose I make that impossible.

• You will outtrick Zdenek?

• I’ll contact The New York Times. Before seeing Zdenek, I’ll tell them the whole story of these stories. They’ll run an article about them. Suppose I do that as soon as I’m back.

• So that’s what you get out of it! That’s your idealism! The marvelous Zuckerman brings from behind the Iron Curtain two hundred unpublished Yiddish stories written by a victim of a Nazi bullet. You will be a hero to the Jews and to literature and to all of the Free World. On top of all your millions of dollars and millions of girls, you will win the American Prize for Idealism about Literature. And what will happen to me? I will go to prison for smuggling a manuscript to the West.

• They won’t know the stories came through you.

• But they know already that I have them. They know everything I have. They have a list of everything that everybody has. You get the idealism prize, he gets the royalties, she gets the jewelry, and I get seven years. For the sake of literature.

Here she gels up from the bed. goes to the dresser, and removes from the top drawer a deep box for chocolates. I untie the ribbon on the box. Inside, hundreds of pages of unusually thick paper, rather like the heavy waxed paper that oily foodstuff’s used to be wrapped in at the grocery. The ink is black, the margins perfect. the Yiddish script is sharp and neat. None of the stories seems longer than five or six pages. I can’t read them.

[Back in bed) You don’t have to give me money. You don’t have to find me a queer to be my husband. [Beginning to cry) You don’t even have to fuck me, if I am such an unattractive woman. To be fucked is the only freedom left in this country. To fuck and to be fucked is all we have left that they cannot stop, but you do not have to fuck me, if I am such an unattractive woman compared to the American girls. He can even print the stories in his own name, your friend Sisovsky. The hell with it. The hell with everything. In spite of the charm with which he seduced you, with which he seduces everybody, he can be quite vicious — do you know.’ There is great brutality in your Sisovsky. Did he tell you about all his doubts — his tragic doubts? What shit! Before Zdenek left Prague, we measured personal vanity here in millisisovskys. Zdenek will survive in America. He is human in the worst sense of the word. Zdenek will flourish, ihanks to his dead father. So will she. And in return, I want nothing. Only that when he asks you how much did you have to give her, how much money and how many fucks, you will do me one favor: tell him you had to give me nothing. Tell her.

At the hotel, two plainclothes policemen come to the room and confiscate the candy box full of Yiddish manuscript within fifteen minutes of my return. They are accompanied by the hotel clerk who’d earlier in the day handed me Hrobek’s note. “They wish to examine your belongings, sir,” he tells me — ”they say somebody has mislaid something which you may have picked up by mistake.” “My belongings are none of their business.” “I’m afraid you are wrong. That is precisely their business.” As the police begin their search I ask him, “And you, what’s your business?” “I merely work at the reception desk. It is not only the intellectual who may be sent down to the mines if he does not cooperate with the present regime, the hotel clerk can be demoted as well. As one of our famous dissidents has said, a man who speaks only the truth, ‘There is always a lower rung under the feet of every citizen on the ladder of the state.’” I demand to be allowed to telephone the American Embassy, and not so as to arrange a wedding. I am told instead to pack my bags. I will be driven to the airport and put on the next plane out of Prague. I am no longer welcome as a visitor in Czechoslovakia. “I want to speak to the American ambassador. They cannot confiscate my belongings. There are no grounds on which to expel me from this country.” “Sir, though it may appear to you that ardent supporters of this regime are few and far between, there are also those, like these two gentlemen, who have no trouble believing that what they do is right, correct, and necessary. Brutally necessary. I am afraid that any further delay is going to cause them to be less lenient than you would like.” “What the box contains is simply manuscript — stories written by somebody who’s been dead now thirty years, fiction about a world that no longer even exists, It is no possible threat to anyone.” “I am grateful, sir, in times like these, still to be able to support my family. There is nothing a clerk in a Prague hotel can do for any writer, living or dead.” When I demand for the third time to speak to the Embassy, I am told that if I do not immediately pack my bags and prepare to leave, I will be arrested and taken to jail. “How do I know,” I ask, “that they won’t take me to jail anyway?” “I suppose,” the clerk replies, “that you will have to trust them.”

Either Olga had a change of heart and called the cops, or else they called on her. Klenek’s is bugged, everyone says so. I just cannot believe that she and the hotel clerk work for the same boss, but maybe that’s because I am a shallow, sentimental, American idiot Jew.

At the desk the police wait while I charge my bills to the Diners Club and then I am accompanied by them to a black limousine. One policeman sits up front with the driver and the candy box, and the other in the back with me and a bulky, bespectacled, elderly man who introduces himself gruffly as Novak. Soft, fine white hair like the fluff of a dry dandelion. Otherwise a man made of meat. He is no charmer like the hotel clerk.

Out beyond the heavy city traffic I am unable to tell if we really are on the airport road. Can they be taking me to jail in a limo? I always seem to end up in these large black cars. The dashboard says this one is a Tatra 603.

“Sie sprechen Deuisch, nicht wahr?” Novak asks me.

“Etwas.”

“Kennen sie Fraulein Betty MacDonald?”

We continue in Gennan. “I don’t,” I say.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“You don’t know Miss Betty MacDonald?”

I can’t stop thinking how badly this can still turn out — or, alternatively, that I could honorably have abandoned the mission once I saw the dangers were real. Because Sisovsky claimed to be my counterpart from the